A Decade-Long Detour Back to the Same Table

"The terms seem no better than what Obama secured under the JCPOA nearly a decade ago. America lost 14 precious service members and wasted billions of dollars on this foolish endeavour." — Representative Ro Khanna, June 14, 2026

The deal is done. What remains is the question of what the war was for.

Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, provided one answer on Sunday. "The war was a costly lesson for the US," he said in a statement. "As expected, Trump failed to bring about regime change. The terms seem no better than what Obama secured under the JCPOA nearly a decade ago. America lost 14 precious service members and wasted billions of dollars on this foolish endeavour." He added that Americans could at least expect gas and food prices to fall, and that no more American or civilian lives would be lost.

That is a precise indictment, and it is worth sitting with. Khanna's figure of 14 American dead is slightly higher than the Pentagon's confirmed count of 13 service members killed as of early April; the final number may differ as the accounting closes. What is not disputed is the cost in a broader sense: the Pentagon put a $25 billion price tag on the war, a figure that does not capture the wider economic damage from the Strait of Hormuz closure. The Trump administration never stated regime change as a formal objective. It did not need to. The logic of the campaign — the scale of the bombardment, the targeting of senior military and political figures, the blockade of the Strait — only coheres as a strategy if the goal was something more than a nuclear agreement. A nuclear agreement was available without a war. The JCPOA, which the first Trump administration withdrew from in 2018, had produced exactly that. What the past year produced, at a cost of at least $25 billion and more than a dozen American lives, is an agreement to negotiate toward something that already existed and was abandoned.

The Iranian cost reframes that calculation entirely. Independent estimates put the overall death toll at more than 10,000, including civilians. Iranian government figures, which carry the usual caveat that wartime states manage their casualty data, had reported more than 3,400 dead with close to half of them civilians before the full accounting was complete. The 12-day bombing campaign that opened the war killed more than 1,000 people, among them several hundred civilians and dozens of children. That toll will define how the war is remembered across the region regardless of what the 60-day nuclear talks produce. Khanna's "costly lesson" has a different weight depending on which side of the Strait of Hormuz you are standing on.

The National Iranian American Council called on both governments to implement the deal in good faith, resist efforts to sabotage it, and use the opening to build a broader path away from sanctions, war, and what it called collective punishment. The phrase is deliberate. Sanctions regimes fall most heavily on civilian populations — on access to medicine, to financial systems, to the basic infrastructure of ordinary life — and the NIAC represents a community that has watched relatives in Iran navigate those conditions for decades. Its statement is not diplomatic boilerplate. It is a demand, addressed simultaneously to Washington and Tehran, that the deal not become another staging ground for the next round.

Sabotage is not a hypothetical concern. The agreement faces structural vulnerabilities that no signing ceremony in Switzerland will resolve. Israel has declared itself not a party to the deal and its government regards the terms as a deep disappointment. The 60-day nuclear negotiation window that follows the signing is precisely the kind of extended technical process during which a single escalation — a strike, a provocation, a domestic political crisis in either capital — can unravel months of diplomacy. Iran's own internal divisions, visible in the gap between the Foreign Ministry's careful public statements and the IRGC's victory declarations, add another layer of uncertainty about whether implementation will be as unified as the announcement.

Beijing is watching all of this with notable caution. China will register the lack of detail in the current agreement, the significant disagreements still to be resolved, and the 60 days of technical talks that separate the announcement from anything resembling a final settlement. A country with substantial economic interests in Iranian oil and a long-standing concern about American military dominance in the Gulf does not read a memorandum of understanding as a concluded outcome. It reads it as the beginning of a process that could still go in several directions.

Khanna's JCPOA comparison is the sharpest element of the domestic reckoning because it names what was lost in the gap between 2018 and now. The withdrawal from the nuclear agreement set in motion a sequence — maximum pressure, Iranian enrichment acceleration, regional escalation, war — that ended with the United States negotiating toward terms it had already secured and chose to abandon. Whatever the 60-day nuclear talks produce, they will be produced against a backdrop that includes the memory of what the intervening years cost: on the American side, at least 13 confirmed dead and $25 billion spent; on the Iranian side, a death toll that independent estimates place above 10,000 and a civilian population that absorbed a year of bombardment.

The deal's supporters are right that its conclusion is better than its alternative. The NIAC is right that implementation matters more than announcement. Beijing is right that the details are unresolved. And Khanna is right that the war that made this agreement necessary did not need to happen.

Sources: Representative Ro Khanna statement; National Iranian American Council statement; Al Jazeera; Reuters; TIME; Pentagon figures via The Hill; independent casualty estimates via Wikipedia's list of deaths in the 2026 Iran war. Casualty figures vary by source and classification method; the piece reflects the range of credible reporting available at time of publication.